Burning again

The West burns again. Like most of our modern experiments, the diversity experiment started with the ideal of equality and only later did we try to figure out how to make it work. Right now, it is failing. The future looks to be similar.

Our President has said that ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon’, a sentiment that many Americans share. But what caused the shooting of Trayvon Martin was not his appearance, but the larger division of American society caused by class warfare and with it, racial antagonism.

The answer may lie in police records, which show that 50 suspicious-person reports were called in to police in the past year at Twin Lakes. There were eight burglaries, nine thefts and one other shooting in the year prior to Trayvon’s death.

In all, police had been called to the 260-unit complex 402 times from Jan. 1, 2011 to Feb. 26, 2012.

It didn’t take long for the media to turn this into a good-guy-versus-bad-guy neighborhood. First the half-Hispanic Zimmerman became “white,” for the sake of an easy story. Then Trayvon became the photograph of a young child, not a picture reflecting how he appeared at the time of the confrontation.

The usual media pundits weighed in, always careful to stir up just enough discontent to sell newspapers. Controversy does not come from complex moral situations and studying the past history of the event. It comes from outrage, tears and rage, and feelings that we all might be victims together.

As a result, the media was quick to launch into a “narrative,” or a background storyline, in which they could wrap this story. The rich white people killed a poor black kid, just for being black. It’s like when they shot MLK or blew up those little girls in Selma.

They are joining the Trayvon Martin crusade by the hour now.

It feels like an echo from another era — when there was racial injustice in the headlines, when federal troops were dispatched to comb Southern swamps to look for blacks who had vanished.

People are channeling their frustration into protest. It’s unclear however what the target of their protest is. The division cuts down the middle: half see this as an example of latent racism in our political system, while others see it as sympathetic useful idiots coddling a kid who assaulted a neighborhood watch officer.

The emotional stories always bring out the “compassion” in people who want to be seen as compassionate. They want to believe in innocent victims and simple solutions. But as even the facts of the incident itself show, there are no such primary colored, yes-or-no answers. It’s a web of intricate dependencies.

Zimmerman, who was patrolling the neighborhood, saw Martin walking in his gated community. He called 911 and reported what he described as a suspicious person. Moments later, several neighbors called the emergency number to report a commotion outside.

It would be easier if there were not a broad pattern of dysfunction here.

According to those on the left, the broad pattern is one of white privilege, institutional racism, poverty for minorities and a permanent non-white underclass.

If you talk to those on the right, the broad pattern is one in which government, media, and socially popular voices demand a “diversity” that is dysfunctional. They point out that the happiest countries are homogenous and have something more to unify themselves other than economics, politics and political affiliation.

Depending on who you believe, the shooting of Trayvon Martin is either another sad incident of an abusive system, or the early revelations of the failures of diversity.

A political scientist at Harvard, Robert Putnam, recently published his research in which he found that the problem is not blacks, or whites. It’s diversity. In any form, diversity leads to reduced trust, lack of social cohesion, paranoia, selfishness and retribution. Even among the same race, diversity causes crushing problems.

Could it be that this problem is less about black crime, white racism, Muslim extremism and European xenophobia than it is about the fact that diversity is dysfunction, wherever it is tried and with whichever ingredients?

Merah’s background of petty crime and poor schooling on a housing estate in a drab neighbourhood of Toulouse has catapulted the question of social inequalities and the integration of minorities in France back onto centre stage in the electoral campaign. Some said the social alienation and discrimination felt by second and third generation, ethnic minority French youths must be addressed in the campaign.

The links in this article are from mainstream and left-leaning newspapers.

There is no longer consensus about the origin of this problem. In the 1960s, when riots wracked cities like Detroit and Los Angeles, the accepted cultural consensus on both sides of the Atlantic was that white racism had withheld economic success and caused a black uprising. In other words, racism was to blame.

Although the usual voices have chimed in with that aged and mystifyingly self-referential refrain, the cultural consensus has evaporated. People are no longer so sure this is a black-versus-white issue. They’re starting to see it as all sane people versus the idea of diversity itself.

How do you mix different cultures? You either end up with an aggregate, which like all averages removes any particular abilities and replaces them with inability, or you force the newcomers to assimilate. That destroys their culture and heritage and replaces it with the majority, or a mix. In other words, you cannot mix cultures.

Fellow student Rachel Bustamante wrote that Carr was asking “absurd questions” during a review section about female selection among peacocks, and eventually went on to ask why “evolution kills black people” in an increasingly insistent manner.

When Dr. Stephen Kajiura apparently couldn’t satisfactorily address Carr’s question, she began yelling as students cleared the area around her desk, rose from her seat and hit a male classmate in the forehead as she screamed in his face.

Diversity assumes that we can. After the American civil war, it became assumed that giving all people equal rights would lead to peace. It did not. Riots broke out in the 1960s. In their wisdom, the powers that be decided to open up immigration in the USA and Europe to people from all over the world.

Now that fifty years have passed on those decisions, we are seeing that the results did not materialize. Detroit is still a burnt-out shell of a city. Whites and blacks still mostly live apart. And we have an endless march of Trayvon Martins, Troy Davises, Hurricane Carters, Mumia Abu-Jamals and other “civil rights martyrs” who attract the sympathy of one side of the political spectrum, and the alienation of the other.

Despite all of this, few will make the honest and clear statement that would get us actually talking about the roots of the problem. That statement is: “Does diversity actually work?” and the answer cannot be airy rhetoric or warm feelings, but hard cold facts. How do you mix cultures without destroying them and replacing them with generic mall culture and featureless gray races of people without history?

No one has answered this vital question.

No one has demanded actual justice for Trayvon Martin. You cannot bring him back to life. What you can do however is fix the situation that put him in a highly volatile conflict.

There is only one way to stop race riots, civil rights martyrs and constant class warfare based on race. It is to give each group self-rule. African-Americans, when ruled by one of their own for their own interests, will have no one to blame. Neither will white Americans, since if African-Americans are ruled by an African-American, that leaves European-Americans to rule themselves, and on down the line for every other ethnic group.

That alone is a solution. It is not a quick emotional fix like crying for Trayvon or raging against the machine. But it is an honest start to figuring out why this happened and working around it ever happening again.

32 thoughts on “Burning again”

The problem is that no matter what we do, multiculturalism doesn’t work because as Putnam shows it increases social alienation. It also causes us to blame the other. When a house gets robbed in a white neighborhood, everyone assumes it’s a white dude. On the other hand whenever a black kid gets shot, everyone assumes it’s white racism and he was a pure little flower (which Trayvon the burgling bungler obviously was not).

I’m always fascinated when events, big and small, from different corners of the globe seem to “cluster” at the same time and point to the same thing. This same time last year the protests were thick all around the world, as well.

People love burning things.
The air, here, is full of smoke, as it is every spring, when people burn huge amounts of debris, trees, and garbage, so we can all breathe the foul-smelling poisons.
I stack debris, in berms, either for fences, or refuges for wildlife. I seem to be the only one who does. Wrens really like berms. I really like wrens.
I built a wren-house, last year, while a wren watched, hopping up and down in anticipation. It moved in even before the house was completed.
Did I miss the point of the essay? Maybe I did.
But looking past borders, at the bigger picture, every point is connected to every other point.There is no outside.

No gasoline for psychos.
Like those hordes of leftists, who presume that everything is simply theirs for the taking: it doesn’t belong to you.
Each of us is responsible, whether we like that responsibility, or not.
Nothing is ours. We have absolutely no right to use it up/destroy it.
We may make use of it, or not, but we must leave it, as we found it, for the next bunch of adolescents that follow.

I really doubt there’s going to be any dramatic “collapse.” You’ll just wake up some morning in a third world nation, where a few rich folks control a giant lumpenproletariat of racially-mixed people who love money and sex.

The problems cannot be fixed. The problems are symptomatic of Xtian belief system that has underpinned the west for millenia now.

You refer back to the French Revolution as “The big decision” time; more accurately, the French Revolution was the culmination of the decision taken to adopt Xtianity.

There is no way to fix the west. There is no heritage to save in the west. There is no unifying idea left in the west that will not ultimately self destruct in precisely the same fashion as what is happening now.

The current status quo is now extremely tired and beyond saving. There will be no restoration. There will be no revival. There will be no renaissance. Only when all existing ideals have been totally scrapped, discarded, and consigned to flames will be a new civilisation be possible.

The house is a shed, sagging in the roof and built on rotting foundations.

I love Metroid Prime. I love the game world. The Chozo Ruins are structures of dignity, permanence, and sober reflection. One of the recurring slogans in MP2 is “Through Vigilance and Strength, we create peace.”

I hate the West. It has always neglected and mocked that attitude. And the authors of this site think it’s worth saving. Ha.

I’ll be glad to see it go.. what a disaster. Perhaps then the last few whites will learn some humility, and I’ll turn round and say, I told you so.

You misunderstand me. I hope the West vanishes because I don’t believe people should be allowed to escape the consequences of their choices.

As I said, I hate the West.. I hate Westerners. I hate their liberal, effete sensibilities. I hate their rowdiness, their casual indifference to facts and logic on the left side, or their casual indifference to anyone who feels alienated on the right side. I hate the cold, contemptful stares of European men for anyone who dares dissent from their opinion. I hate their inability to question themselves, and I especially hate their lack of urgency and inner tension. I hate the constant fawning of the chattering classes, and I hate the constant noise of the working classes and political classes.

I hate the West, because it gave up on everything right and true, I hate the West for raising me with nothing but liberal lies and contempt for my own people, and now I am grown up, I hate my own people because I see they are liars worthy of contempt.

The West threw away my future, and now I want to burn down the West’s future.

I understand you perfectly. You hate people, period.
I understand why. I feel much the same way.
But you are wallowing in an attitude that is – in itself – everything you hate.
Nobody threw away your future.
Nobody ever owed you one.
Your future is whatever you make for yourself.
Nobody else is going to do that.

There’s a problem. We know that.
Are you going to add to it, or decide “Fuck it!”, and do what you can to survive in spite of it?
Men make the best of adverse situations.
Crybabies whine.

Sorry it was me that had to tell you that, but maybe somebody had to. I can do it, because I recognize it in my own past. Men aren’t born men. All were babies, once.

Diversity can work. It can work in the presence of something far greater than street-level reality. The unifying presence of a religion, a nationalism, a language or a philosophical tradition can allow us to get past stupid things like skin color and surname. It’s too bad Modern “Thinkers” are so jubilant that God is dead, nationalism leads to naziism, religion is the opiate of the masses, and philosophy is a series of epistmalogical bong hits. Anything that would give us the tools to actually make diversity work is killed systematically as part and parcel to modern aculturation.

I’ve been seeing the same pattern for days. The implied story is: “Gun crazy racist white republican shoots innocent black boy on his way home.” That is a terrific election year story for the politics of those who write most of the news. However, I doesn’t seem to represent reality in any way.

A report pointed out that “the kid” was actually 6’2″ and the other guy was only 5’9″. Oddly, the story was focused on the fact that the “the kid” was only 140lbs but the evil white guy was a over 200lbs! Reality seems to show that “the kid” was a 160lbs high-school football player. The evil white guy was tubby and clearly not a fitness buff.

The “white guy” of course was “white” in the Tiger Woods sense of mixed race. Meaning a guy with a last name that sounds white in headlines. If you look at his picture, it is easy to see that Trayvon wouldn’t have mistaken him for white. This was FLORIDA after all. Hispanics are not an uncommon sight.

And, sure it makes sense for someone to wander a FLORIDA “gated community” with a black hood over his head. What would make that the least bit suspicious? (A blizzard could blow in at any time.) It is no more suspicious than wandering a Georgia freemen neighborhood with a white hood over your head. (Moonburn is very common among fair skinned white people.)